St Louis

There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice.  In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, ‘running away from loss’. Seventeen years later she has gone back, looking for the motels, diners, cities, suburbs and truck stops encountered on that first trip, and she is stunned by what she finds – stations closed or

Writers dealing with that knottiest of problems in fiction – to what extent can they describe cultures and societies not their own without appropriation, an insulting level of ignorance and/or launching a social media storm – are going about it in different ways. The latest novel by Sebastian Faulks is set in the future (where, pleasingly, everyone still needs a coat, phew). Val McDermid has gone the other way and returned to smoky, bottom-pinching years, starting with 1979. Francis Spufford’s solution to writing about race – and race in America at that – is to propose an alternate reality, invent an intensely detailed city to do it in, and extrapolate